Face Recognition - Real or Science Fiction?

An anonymous reader writes "Facial recognition software has been touted as one of the technologies that will change our future, particularly in law enforcement. How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report? According to the industry's recent Public Relations releases, these products are closer than we think. The reality though, is that current products work only when utilizing a small comparative sample, and any attempts for an individual to disguise themselves typically throw off the results. To see how far this technology needs to go before becoming mainstream, one site utilized Government-tested face recognition software, available freely through MyHeritage.com, to compare hundreds of famous people, animals, and cartoons to a database of 2,000 celebrities. Some of the results showed promise for the technology, but most were just funny — for example, who would mistake Barbara Streisand for Shrek, or Lance Bass of N'Sync for a Teletubby?"

Comments

Re:so I guess...

[CreatureComfort]

No, you totally miss the point. This isn't about failing to recognize a face you are looking for becuase someone uses a disguise, although that is a perfectly valid reason to despise police and gevernment use of this technology. This is about the absurdly high number of false positives you get. So next time you are walking through the airport, get pulled into a back room, falsly identified as a terrorist (after all if the computer says you're him, you must be traveling with false identification), secretly deported to another country and "questioned", then let loose in a completely different country with no passport, ID, or documentation, just because the computer thought you resembled a potential terrorist. You might re-think your position on this.